At 8:30 on the morning of December 11, 1991, Ronald and Angela Rakow were like a million other tag-team parents. He’d just come home from Mount Sinai Hospital, where he worked as a security guard on the midnight to eight shift. She’d just gone out the door to Dock’s restaurant, where she was a cashier a couple of days a week. They had jobs and kids and no day care. It was a typical day until quarter after four that afternoon, when Ron went to change the diaper of his three-and-a-half-month son, Paul, and found he wasn’t breathing.
Posed together on a bed in front of a blank white wall, Ron and Angela Rakow seemed a strange couple. It wasn’t that he was white and she was black or that he was immense and she was slender. And it wasn’t what they said. It was how they looked and sounded while saying it. She sat practically motionless, one hand in her lap, the other holding one of his. Her voice was calm and her eyes steady. He looked nervous. He kept shifting around on the bed and spoke hesitantly, with a lilt in his voice that made him sound like he came from Liverpool. In the first shot of them both were smiling. Neither cried for the camera.
There was no medical evidence that Paul had been smothered, and there were no witnesses. The critical evidence against Rakow came from Rakow himself: the statement, handwritten by a state’s attorney, that he’d signed at the police station at 12:45 AM on April 27. Two years later, in August 1994, Rakow testified during his trial that he hadn’t said many of the things attributed to him in the statement, but a jury still convicted him of first-degree murder. In November he was sentenced to 35 years in prison, and in December he started serving his time.
Many of the details of the case laid out during the trial were never disputed. On December 11, 1991, Ron Rakow got home from work, said hi and bye to his wife, and settled in for the next shift of watching the kids. They had three: Angela’s two daughters from a previous relationship, two-year-old Tiffany and four-year-old Tamara, and Angela and Ron’s son Paul.
The Rakows received their monitor in late October. By early December Paul’s sisters had lost one set of the electric leads while playing with them. The Rakows had a second set, so they taped the leads to Paul’s chest and left them there. Hooking Paul up to the monitor was a fairly simple matter, and he slept with it on every night.
Now the two girls were fighting. Whenever they’d start running around he worried about the landlord’s son who lived below in the basement. The son also worked nights, but he didn’t have any kids. He slept days, and the pounding on the floor above him sometimes kept him up; he’d called his father to complain about it several times.
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“Was there anything unusual that you noticed about his behavior that was different from any other day that you came home or any other time?”
